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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances. These block devices can then be used like any raw block device.

There are two ways that data can be protected when using EBS:

Use the Amazon Identity Management Service to control access Elastic Block Store Volumes. This can be complimented with policy options that enforce policies such as multi-factor authentication, SSL links etc in addition to controlling or locking down originating IP addresses.

Encrypted EBS volumes can be created.These encrypt data at rest.Note that once set an encrypted volume cannot later be unencrypted (the same as an unencrypted volume cannot be later encrypted).

Kate Craig-Wood founder and MD of Memset, a UK Service Provider who had an early involvement in UK G-Cloud, not only from a practical standpoint, but also in an advisory capacity, recently outed G-Cloud with regards to it still being a ‘who you know’ rather than ‘what you provide’ type of marketplace, the very thing it was supposed to move away from with regards its ability to provide a level playing ground for UK SME’s. Kate’s post goes onto layout Memset’s own experience with G-Cloud from a commercial viewpoint (or lack thereof).

In a counter post Nicky Stewart, commercial director at Skyscape Cloud Services, lays out a counter argument which in essence states that whereas “G-Cloud isn’t perfect, and never will be… it would be a disservice to G-Cloud, its buyers and suppliers, to suggest that G-Cloud is a fundamentally broken model”. Stewart goes onto outline that Skyscape grew with G-Cloud and has created over 130 jobs to date.

G-Cloud sales are growing month on month, now exceeding £1bn, and the proof of success will be in achieving the government 33% SME spend target goal.

OwnCloud Inc recently announced that, after 5 years, it was shutting down its operations. Given the press and announcements coming out of OwnCloud in recent months this seemed a strange turn of events and one surmises that at some level revenues and sales must have played a part. OwnCloud had some stellar partnerships, including Redhat, in the Open Source space, which already seem to have been taken over but other incumbents capitalising on their demise. Storage Made Easy, a commercial not open source vendor, yesterday announced their own partnership with RedHat at a storage level, with a primary focus on Ceph and OpenStack.

Whilst not entirely in a similar vein, but perhaps with a similar ethos, another enterprise file sharing vendor has announced a pivot. Engine announce that they were now focusing on protecting documents rather than Enterprise File Share and Sync which they believe to be commoditised. Engine’s issue is that the hosted Enterprise File Share and Sync is indeed saturated unlike the self hosted space which seems to be much more in demand from the enterprise. Although Egnyte purports a hybrid capability they really are a service provider in which data goes back through their back end eco-system which, since they took Google venture money, is Google’s storage infrastructure.

The Egnyte announcement comes off the back of a previous pivot in which Egnyte announced they were focused on analytics and the adaptive enterprise. Maybe one of these will eventually stick ! Egnyte is not entirely going to have this space to themselves with other incumbents such as Accellion (who had/ have their own issue given the recently reported FaceBook breach), Watchdox ( a BlackBerry company since 2015) and Storage Made Easy all providing audit and governance features across a wide range of storage endpoints and , at least some of those vendors, do provide secure on-site behind the firewall self-hosting.

Expect to see more companies falling by the wayside, even maybe some unicorns in this space, as it commoditises and VC backed vendors come under pressure to prove out revenue models.

Linux instances running on Amazon EC2 can now be joined to Simple AD directories from the AWS Directory Service.

This enables users to log in to all of their EC2 instances with a single set of domain credentials (no key pair needed) and set access controls, allowing domain admins to control which users can access particular instances.

Simple AD is a managed directory powered by a Samba 4, Active Directory Compatible Server. It supports commonly used features such as user accounts, group memberships, domain-joining Amazon EC2 instances running Linux and Microsoft Windows, as well as Kerberos based single sign-on (SSO), and Group Policies.

This makes it very easy for companies to be able to manage Amazon EC2 instances in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

We just came off an Azure project and we thought it would be useful to push out our notes on keeping a hosted server time in sync.

1. We were configuring a Linux hosted server on Azure and thehe NTP protocol uses UDP on port 123. But you don’t have to allow that on ‘iptables’ in Linux – NTP just gets passed through.

2. On Azure you don’t have to define the port in the VM configuration, like you do for 22/80/443.

3. Old) posts say Azure doesn’t support UDP, but it seems to now.

4. In theory, Azure provides a service “time.windows.com” but it was 80ms behind the standard servers at [0123].centos.pool.ntp.org.

After configuring the clock on the hosted Linux appliance starts drifting very quickly.
The problem seems to be that there are problems with the time sync in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, which is what Azure is built on.

The solution is to look at the changes required to grub.conf and ntp.conf as described at:

Google Storage is targeted at businesses and a Google Storage account is required to take advantage of Google Nearline as Nearline is a choice when creating a Google Storage bucket / container.

Once a bucket is designated as Google Nearline it can be used immediately.

Google positions Nearline as providing “the convenience of online storage at the price of offline storage” and indeed it does with access and retrieval times in the order of around 3 seconds.

Nearline also offers regionality of the storage bucket (similar to what users can expect from Amazon S3 / Glacier). This allows users to control where data is stored. The regional options include U.S., Europe and Asia. The regional storage buckets are not expected to be fully available until Nearline emerges from beta.

Users can also create Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes that can store up to 16 TB, and process up to 10,000 IOPS. These volumes are designed for five 9s of availability and up to 320 megabytes per second of throughput when attached to EBS optimized instances.

These performance improvements make it even easier to run applications requiring high performance or high amounts of storage, such as large transactional databases, big data analytics, and log processing systems. Users can now run large-scale, high performance workloads on a single volume, without needing to stripe together several smaller volumes.

Larger and faster volumes are available now in all commercial AWS regions and in AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more please check out the Amazon EBS details page.

OpenStack, the open-source on-premise alternative to Amazon S3 is heading into 2015 with a vast mount of momentum. VC’s are falling over themselves to invest in OpenStack related companies and there seems to be genuine enterprise momentum.

The OpenStack story kicked off in 2010 and was initially a combined project between Rackspace and NASA. Fast forward to 2015 and it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation which is a non-profit corporate entity that was established in September 2012 as a means to promote OpenStack software.

Most people may know OpenStack primarily due to it’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution, but it also has an object Storage solution, called ‘Swift’ (not to be confused with Apple’s new programming language, also confusingly called ‘Swift’) which also has garnered a momentum of its own.

Object Storage is a type storage architecture that manages data as objects unlike other storage systems which either manage data as a file hierarchy or as blocks within sectors and tracks (block storage).

The advantages of object storage architectures is that they offer unlimited scalability with a lower emphasis on processing and they offer access using Internet protocols (REST) rather than storage commands.

As an example of the sums of money involved, Mirantis recently closed a round for $100 million and SwiftStack a round for $16 million, taking both company to total investments of $120 million and $23.6 million respectively. IBM also purchased SoftLayer for a reputed $2 billion. It’s clear that VC’s and Software vendors see something special in OpenStack.

Amazon Web Services may rule when it comes to public cloud but a recent survey sponsored by GigaOM gave results indicating that half of private clouds deployed where OpenStack based.

OpenStack, like Amazon Web Services, is primarily supplied with REST API’s and toolkits that developers can use to interact with the OpenStack infrastructure. As with AWS this creates opportunities for vendors at the Application level to provide Apps and tools.

Storage Made Easy is a company that has already make an impact on the OpenStack community with its Enterprise File Share and Sync product offering, which has been optimized for OpenStack Swift. The company, itself a startup, already has a growing number of service providers and customer using its enterprise application in conjunction with OpenStack Swift, and has partnered with a number of the key players listed above in a strategy focused around taking advantage of OpenStack’s growth.

Other companies are treading the same path and this itself creates an eco-system of enterprise ready Applications ready to take advantage of OpenStack’s foothold in the Enterprise to grow or to be acquired.

Of course, with OpenStack being an open-source initiative it is not just commercial Apps that have sprung up around OpenStack. There are Open Source Applications such as Swift Explorer and CyberDuck, but strangely, given the Open Source root of OpenStack there seems to be more commercial offerings rather than open source offerings.

All in all OpenStack is an initiative that is in its ascendancy. It used to be said that OpenStack was more hype than reality but as we head into 2015 the money men have placed their bets and they tend to bet on reality rather than hype.

If you next to deploy Linux on Cloud you should consider hardening the Linux instance prior to any deployment. Below are guidelines we have pulled together with regards to hardening a RedHat or CentOS instance.

Hardening Redhat linux guidelines

enable selinux

Ensure that /etc/selinux/config includes the following lines:
SELINUX=enforcing
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

Run the following on commandline to allow httpd to create outbound network connections
setsebool httpd_can_network_connect=1

check using
sestatus
To enable/disable
echo 1 >/selinux/enforce

disable the services

chkconfig anacron off
chkconfig autofs off
chkconfig avahi-daemon off
chkconfig gpm off
chkconfig haldaemon off
chkconfig mcstrans off
chkconfig mdmonitor off
chkconfig messagebus off
chkconfig readahead_early
chkconfig readahead_early off
chkconfig readahead_later off
chkconfig xfs off

Disable IPv6

Unless your policy or network configuration requires it, disable IPv6. To do so, prevent the kernel module from loading by adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:
install ipv6 /bin/true
Next, add or change the following lines in /etc/sysconfig/network:
NETWORKING_IPV6=no
IPV6INIT=no

Nessus PCI Scan

Upgrade openssh to latest version

upgrade bash to latest version

http://www.thecpaneladmin.com/upgrading-openssh-on-centos-5/

Set HTTP headers off

In /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf set the following values
ServerTokens Prod
ServerSignature Off
TraceEnable off

Normally this blog is pretty tech focused but we thought we’d depart slightly from our normal mode operandus and provide a high level overview on Google Adwords with regards to spend. We often get asked. How much should we spend ? If we are only spending a small amount should we even bother ? Good questions, so here is our 5 cents:

– To let you figure out effectiveness plan a test budget and test campaign matrix and run it for a month or so to see where you get the best bang for you buck

– Remember It is not about the spend it is about the ROI. If the ROI holds up your spend should increase.

– Your should focus on Earnings Per Click (EPC) not Cost Per Click (CPC). That is what really counts. (EPC = Customer Value X Conversion Rate)

Focus on how to increase EPC during your trial. In particular:

– Set up Google Adwords conversion tracking – without it your campaign is worthless. You need to be able to track conversions.

– Focus on refining the Ad to make it as compelling as possible. Monitor the conversions won (or lost) due to the change.

– You must create relevance between the Ad and the landing page otherwise Google will score you down as your prospects quickly click away and/or the check the page for relevant keywords.

– Focus on the most cost effective keywords. Don’t bother with those that are outside of your value range i.e those that eat into your ROI or end up in a negative ROI.

– Use lots of negative keywords to prevent untargeted traffic.

That’s it ! There are a gazillion great ways of refining or making Adwords work for you (Long Tail keywords, different type of matches etc) but these high level tips should get you on the right road from the beginning.